1) Biography........................................... p. 2-5

2) Discoveries......................................... p. 6-7

3) Quotes................................................ p. 8

4) Tasks............................................ p. 9-13

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643 in the tiny village of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England.

His father, whose name was also Isaac Newton, was a farmer who died before Isaac Junior was born. Although comfortable financially, his father could not read or write.

His mother, Hannah Ayscough, married a churchman when Newton was three years old.

Newton disliked his mother’s new husband and did not join their household, living instead with his mother’s mother, Margery Ayscough.

His resentment of his mother and stepfather’s new life did not subside with time; as a teenager he threatened to burn their house down!

Beginning at age 12, Newton attended The King’s School, Grantham, where he was taught the classics, but no science or mathematics. When he was 17, his mother stopped his schooling so that he could become a farmer. Fortunately for the future of science Newton found he had neither aptitude nor liking for farming; his mother allowed him to return to school, where he finished as top student.

In June 1661, aged 18, Newton began studying for a law degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, earning money working as a personal servant to wealthier students.

By the time he was a third-year student he was spending a lot of his time studying mathematics and natural philosophy (today we call it physics). He was also very interested in alchemy, which we now categorize as a pseudoscience.

His natural philosophy lecturers based their courses on Aristotle’s incorrect ideas from Ancient Greece. This was despite the fact that 25 years earlier, in 1638, Galileo Galilei had published his physics masterpiece Two New Sciences establishing a new scientific basis for the physics of motion.

In June 1661, aged 18, Newton began studying for a law degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, earning money working as a personal servant to wealthier students.

By the time he was a third-year student he was spending a lot of his time studying mathematics and natural philosophy (today we call it physics). He was also very interested in alchemy, which we now categorize as a pseudoscience.

His natural philosophy lecturers based their courses on Aristotle’s incorrect ideas from Ancient Greece. This was despite the fact that 25 years earlier, in 1638, Galileo Galilei had published his physics masterpiece Two New Sciences establishing a new scientific basis for the physics of motion.

Newton began to disregard the material taught at his college, preferring to study the recent (and more scientifically correct) works of Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, and Kepler. Reading the works of these great scientists, Newton grew more ambitious about making discoveries himself. While still working part-time as a servant, he wrote a note to himself. In it he posed questions which had not yet been answered by science. These included questions about gravity, the nature of light, the nature of color and vision, and atoms.

After three years at Cambridge he won a four-year scholarship, allowing him to devote his time fully to academic studies.

In 1665, at the age of 22, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, he made his first major discovery: this was in mathematics, where he discovered the generalized binomial theorem. In 1665 he was also awarded his B.A. degree.

Sir Isaac formulated the law of universal gravitation and the three laws of mechanics. Newton invented a mirror telescope and developed a theory of color, discovering that a glass prism is capable of decomposing white light into the colors of the visible spectrum. He is the author of the empirical law of cooling, which describes the loss of heat during heat transfer, and also Newton was one of the first to study the propagation of sound.

Isaac Newton’s Scientific Achievements and Discoveries

Mirror Telescope

Theory of color

The law of action and reaction

The law of universal gravitation